4 Common Blogging Mistakes That Prevent You From Growing Your Business

If you feel that your blogging efforts are taking you nowhere, stop what you’re doing. Now make sure you’re not making one of these common mistakes. Image by Christina T via Flickr.

Your blog is a great way to deliver value to your prospects and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

But if you’re not blogging strategically – with your business goals in mind – then chances are you’re preventing hoards of interested prospects from converting.

A successful content marketing plan shouldn’t only bring you visitors. If done right, it should also bring you thousands of new prospects and customers.

Our blog is – by a huge margin – our biggest source of new customers. We’ve done some stuff right, and a lot of stuff wrong (especially in the beginning). And we’ve learned a massive amount from both our wins and our fails.

Here are the four biggest, most costly mistakes we made early on. I hope that by sharing them, you can avoid the same fails and start reaping the benefits of a successful blogging strategy.

How do I know this is effective? Because as soon as we started to directly offer our service to blog subscribers by directing them to a landing page, we started getting significantly more conversions.

In the past, when a reader signed up for our email list, they’d get an email welcoming them to the list, and that was it. No pitch. Now, when a reader signs up, they’re taken to a landing page built just for blog readers:

We’ve started to use the same approach for our guest blogging, too. Before, readers who clicked on links to Groove in our guest posts would be taken to our homepage.

Now, readers are sent to a targeted landing page, customized for each guest post.

Mistake #4: Letting people forget about you

A year ago, when posting once every two-to-three weeks, our open rates were low (averaging around 15%) and our unsubscribe rate was higher (around 3%) than it should’ve been.

When we started posting and emailing weekly, both stats improved significantly; open rates more than tripled to nearly 50%, and unsubscribes are down to under 1%.

Becoming a regular presence in your readers’ lives keeps them engaged and eager to read your content. Being erratic and disappearing from their inboxes for weeks at a time makes your email just another annoyance they didn’t expect.

I used to spend a ton of time working on blog too Jeff. I’m not that great at it & found my time doing Physical Therapy & running the company was much more my calling! LOL Seriously think about hiring someone to blog content for you. It’s hard to find awesome and affordable but I lucked out. If you’re interested the team I use is from zessistantsolutions@gmail.com and I’m sure they’d be able to help you. I’m always amazed at the content they provide. They’re very good to work with! Just a thought. I know how much time can be wasted trying not only to write your own content but to get it right and not have a bunch of mistakes after hours of your brain smoking! LOL

We are just rebuilding our entire site and adding a heap of new content, so these tips are super helpful!
One of the main points we make to our clients, is that you dont always need new content-you just new new promotion of that content!
Funny you never take your own medicine tho eh!?
Dan@twotreesseo

1) Not Highlighting Key Takeaways -If the reader has to dig deep in for key points the likelihood is he would discontinue reading. Bolding and highlighting the key points will attract the readers and help me extract key points at a glance.

2) Using Too Many Jargon’s – Bloggers think by using very flowery languages , industry jargon’s , lingo and vocabulary they will impress the reader but many times they loose the reader. Using big words is not bad but it has to be used in the right context.

3) Do Check Spelling & Grammar – Incorrect spelling and wrong grammar will tun off the reader and he may never return to your blog. Use online free tools for spelling as well as grammar check before publishing the article.

4) No Pop Up Ads Please – Ads appearing out of no where while the reader is intensely reading the blog post is very irritating and annoying for them.

I found that leaving the actual blogging to an expert saves me time. I can do final edits if desired, but I’ve found a resource that is posting awesome content for a reasonable amount; leaving me with time to do other things. However, keeping up on blogging information helps too (such as this type of info from you guys!)
BTW if you’re interested in using the group I use for social media content you can email them at zessistantsolutions@gmail.com (as strange as it sounds they spend their time doing others’ social media and web content discreetly & get all of their customers via word of mouth basically). They are on FaceBook too if you just search their email. Thanks for the great info!

I’m a huge fan of your content strategy and blog. You have done a phenomenal job. My problem is spending too much time writing, not promoting enough, and inconsistently sending emails to my list. I’ve pretty much won the crappy marketer’s trifecta. I think it’s about time to change that. Thanks for the reminder.

Wow! Simple Wow. This article made up my day. My first visit to this website and have bookmarked it already.
Just decided to change my subscribtion form. It was just too boring, will add some swag to it. :D

I agree that directing people towards the landing page is very important . It is the only way to convert our readers into potential customers . Otherwise no matter how many readers you get , you wont get sales .

Updating blog is also very important as you have already mentioned . People are hungry of information . This is the main reason why blogs like mashable are so popular . A single person visits these blogs multiple times a day as they expect to find some new and interesting content there. . Thus they have a far wider readership .

This month on my radio show, I am talking about blogging, and I shared your information with our audience. In my blog, I have made the same mistakes you are talking about. I have signed up for your newsletter and look forward to hearing more of what you have to say.

Great insights for the novice and the veteran blogger.

Keep up the good work.

Graeme E

Alex, thank you for this blog. Finally I read that a blog is work and promoting. I felt 1 a week was about all I could do and elsewhere I would see write daily. Maybe if I didn’t have a business to operate I could. Thanks again. I will follow you on twitter too!

Hi Alex!
Great content here. I signed up for the $100k Journey email BECAUSE it was so easy to do and it was at the bottom of every post I read. I binged on reading your content and learned so much! I am going to implement that strategy and see where it goes. Thanks!

I dont just say this about everything I read. Seriously, this was hands down the most influential post I have read about blogging, ever! Not only did it simply tell me what to change and what to improve but it actually motivated me to do so. Many times you will read something and your like, ok i need to make a note of that, this was like, I need to go to work immediately and start implementing these four things, (because yes i am making all four mistakes). I think it may have been the before and after number shots. Whatever it was, great read! Thanks for infecting us with your knowledge.

This post is full of true facts and figure and explain the reality in a very good details. I use to keep learning the news thing online every day, so today plan to follow your blog for improving my skill and keep my blog healthy by using these tips and learning.

It doesn’t matter, In which field you are working. You would definitely make mistakes and these mistakes will help you to learn something new. So we should never afraid of doing mistakes.

In this article, the blogging mistakes which you have mentioned above are very much common which most of the bloggers or webmasters make when they start their blogging career.

When bloggers like me do mistakes then It is obvious that they can’t generate that result which they want because of that mistake. When It happens, they again start doing all the things and tries to find what they did wrong in previous turn and then they find their mistakes and learn from that mistake.

So some how, mistakes helped us to learn new things. Right? :D

Most of the people think that doing mistakes will give them failures which they never want but they should understand that every successful person makes mistake at their initial stages and learn from them.

Every successful blogger copied others article once in their blogging journey but later they learned and started writing by themselves.

I would like to give a great Thanks to you for covering these amazing blogging mistakes which people can use to learn from them. :D

Well written post sir! I think these might be the four biggest culprits why a blog suffers. It is an exciting time to be a marketer. Especially as online and offline marketing continue to merge into one. Thank you

Thanks for sharing useful insights about blogging.Reading this list is a great reminder for all of us because not only do we see these mistakes every day, but we have all probably made most of them as we learned and developed our skills over time!
Over promoting yourself or your service is natural for most of us. Good quality content only comes from with-in and not from rehashing material you see everywhere

Pretty much all the dangerous blogging mistakes summed up in a single post. I find the most intriguing mistake that a blogger can commit is forcing the readers to take actions like facebook likes and sign ups. To some extent it is ok. Popups and optin boxes but some people make those options and popups unskippable which probably is detrimental in the long run.

Awesome article. It will be really helpful. This is very common among the bloggers that they do some mistakes at the bigenning of blogging. It is really harmful for our blog. I also did some mitakes at the bigenning. It was really disturbing. Your article help the newbies to avoid all the cmmon blogging mistakes. Thanks for sharing such an informative article.